Benedict XVI 1927-2022

With the death of Pope Benedict XVI, we lost one of the most idiosyncratic and essential figures in the modern history of Christianity who, in translating fundamental questions about the nature of the universe into the language of his own era, spoke for all time. The meaning of his papacy—his relationship with his sainted predecessor, his restoration of the traditional Latin Mass, the creation of the Ordinariate, perhaps above all the implications of his resignation—will fully emerge in the years, decades, and likely centuries to come. For the moment we can only reflect on his life and legacy, much in the way mourners write in the guest book at a funeral.

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in the village of Marktl am Inn, Altöttingen, and baptized the same day. His father, Joseph Ratzinger was a police officer; his mother, Maria Ratzinger was a baker’s daughter. He had two elder siblings, Maria Theogona Ratzinger and Monsignor Georg Ratzinger; they remained close throughout their lives. In 1937, he began his classical education at the Gymnasium in Traunstein, a half hour’s walk from the Ratzingers’ new home in Hufschlag. Then, in April 1939, he enrolled in the diocesan minor seminary, which closed in 1942 when the building was requisitioned by the army. He did not resume his Gymnasium education for long: in August 1943 he was drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps. The following year he was conscripted, first into the Reich Labour Service, then the infantry; but he deserted from the Wehrmacht in May 1945 and returned home, where he was detained by American forces, and interned in a prisoner of war camp until July 1945. Shortly afterwards, he re-entered the seminary in Traunstein.

In 1947, he studied at the Herzogliches Georgianum, a theological institute affiliated with the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. One of his professors was the dogmatic theologian Father Michael Schmaus, who disapproved of Joseph Ratzinger’s apparent sympathies for “modernist” approaches to theology. Not only was young Ratzinger increasingly close intellectually to Father Romano Guardini; he was also showing interest in the work of Father Henri de Lubac, who spent most of the 1950s under sanction by the Jesuits, and was forbidden to teach.

Georg and Joseph Ratzinger were both ordained priests in June 1951 by Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber. Father Joseph Ratzinger soon began lecturing at the seminary in Freising, and passed his doctoral examinations summa cum laude in 1953. His dissertation was titled “The People and the House of God in Saint Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church.” At Easter in 1956, Ratzinger was shocked to learn that Schmaus had rejected his seven-hundred-page “Habilitation” thesis in fundamental theology. But he was allowed to resubmit a drastically shortened version of the text in February 1957. Thereafter his career resumed its rapid rise; in January 1958 he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Dogmatics and Theology at the Freising College of Philosophy and Theology, with later appointments at Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and Regensburg.

Ratzinger’s brilliance as a theologian soon attracted the notice of Josef cardinal Frings, archbishop of Cologne and President of the German Bishops’ Conference. Frings asked him to ghost-write the text of a speech that he was invited to give in Genoa in November 1961, entitled “The Council Against the Background of the Present Time in Contrast to the First Vatican Council.” Pope John XXIII congratulated Frings on the text. Ratzinger would become Cardinal Fring’s closest advisor at the Second Vatican Council. Ratzinger became well known internationally as a “progressive” theologian during the council; he was known to be friendly with controversial figures including de Lubac, Father Karl Rahner, and Father Hans Küng. By the end of the council, the first rifts in his relationship with Küng were already visible; his lecture in Münster in June 1965 (“True and False Renewal in the Church”) marked the beginning of a lifelong battle to secure the legacy of the Second Vatican Council.

In 1969, Ratzinger expressed his dismay in uncharacteristically blunt terms when Pope Paul VI decided to suppress the ancient rite of the Mass. His address for the sixtieth anniversary of Cardinal Frings’s ordination as a priest, “The Situation of the Church Today: Hopes and Dangers,” marks the beginning of his reputation as a “conservative”—a reputation that was more thrust upon him than one he sought after himself.

To help maintain the “true spirit of Vatican II,” Ratzinger founded the international theological journal Communio along with de Lubac and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar. Many of the bishops and cardinals appointed by Pope Saint John Paul II were directly associated with Communio. Ratzinger’s influence spread further still with the international success of his first popular book, Introduction to Christianity. In March 1977, Ratzinger was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising; in April he turned fifty; in June he was appointed Cardinal. He spent just under five years in Munich; in November 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Ratzinger’s long, frank discussion with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in August 1984 was published in 1985 as The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church. Küng’s harsh review in Die Zeit, with the ungenerous headline, “The Old Inquisition Is Dead, Long Live the New,” improbably presented this gentle, shy, conciliatory theologian as a cantankerous, uncompromising reactionary. Küng’s distorted depiction became a common understanding even in Catholic media.

In April 2005, John Paul II, with whom Ratzinger had worked closely from the time of the council, died. As dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Ratzinger presided over the funeral. Shortly afterwards, on April 19, 2005, he was elected pope, taking the name Benedict XVI. One of Pope Benedict’s most important contributions to the revival of Catholic life was his promulgation of the apostolic letter Summorum pontificum in 2007, which enabled priests to celebrate the ancient Mass without permission from Rome or their local bishop. This, like seemingly every single major act of his papacy—from his lecture delivered in 2006 at the University of Regensburg to his creation of the Ordinariate and regularization of the Society of Saint Pius X—provoked controversy and unfavorable media attention. Pope Benedict was exhausted by scandal after scandal. At the end of January 2013, he wrote out a short text in Latin announcing his resignation as Bishop of Rome, and made his decision public on February 11.

Pope Benedict spent almost a decade as “Pope Emeritus,” living in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, where he died on New Year’s Eve 2022. Below we present the thoughts of those who knew him, some personally, some only through his writings and work. But all appreciate his importance in the history of the Church and of the world.

Archbishop José H. Gomez

In his first homily as pope, Benedict XVI told us: “Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is . . . . There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.” Benedict is right. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel. Nothing is more beautiful than to meet Jesus. Our Christian life, the life of faith, always begins with an invitation. It begins in friendship, in witness—one heart speaking to another heart about the love that they have found in Jesus.

Pope Benedict understood that the modern world is moving away from God, that faith is fading from the hearts of many people, that our society is growing cold and intolerant toward religion. But he also knew that God is not finished with his creation, not done building his kingdom on Earth. Jesus is still calling, still knocking at the door of every human heart. Benedict reminded us that the Church’s mission is Christ’s mission: to seek and to save the lost. It’s not just about popes and bishops, priests, and religious. All of us share in this mission, every one of us who has been baptized. Each of us is called, each in our own way and in the circumstances of our own lives, to speak to others of our love for Jesus and our friendship with Him. When we meet the living God in Jesus Christ and follow him, our lives change.

To be surprised by the Gospel is to discover the truth about where we come from, and and what we are living for. When we allow the love of Christ to fill our hearts, the gate of Heaven stands open before us. We see with certainty that we walk in the light of His divine presence, in the company of angels and saints. The little things in our everyday lives become like a ladder that can lead us to Heaven.

I am confident that Pope Benedict will be remembered among the great figures in the history of the Church—a great teacher and biblical theologian and one of the most brilliant minds in the West. But as Pope Benedict looks on the face of God and listens to His voice, he knows his legacy is not one of great words and important books. His legacy is the countless souls who will continue to find friendship with Jesus through his gentle invitation to be surprised by the Gospel.

José H. Gomez is archbishop of Los Angeles, home to the largest Catholic community in the United States. He is the former president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.


Christopher 
Caldwell

Assessing Joseph Ratzinger’s life as a man of the Church, including his eight-year papal reign as Benedict XVI, we would do well to consider the sea of opinion in which his Catholic generation swam. When Benedict visited England in 2010, several prominent citizens—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, and the gay activist Peter Tatchell, egged on by the writer Christopher Hitchens—urged that he be arrested. In a letter to the Guardian, several dozen British authors and actors laid out the reasons for denying him an official visit, and these were the same as the ones for throwing him in the hoosegow. These included “segregated” (i.e., by sex) religious education, priestly sexual misbehavior, the failure to provide birth control in poor countries, opposition to abortion, and homophobia.

Barely a decade later, many of these charges look preposterous. How many condoms was the British Actors’ Guild handing out in the Third World at the time? At the height of the A.I.D.S. epidemic, when the “homophobic” Church was changing the bed sheets and cleaning the bedpans of a quarter of the world’s sufferers, how many was the Guardian taking care of? Even the grave problem of priestly abuse has receded, if the damage has not. There was one seriously wayward generation of priests—the bulk of the cases involved priests who came of age between 1955 and 1975. In our own century, Roman clerics have done a better job of respecting their wards than Hollywood producers have.

The problems of the Church in recent decades have been problems of transition. That is not to say they are passing problems, though, because the transition, which centered on the Second Vatican Council, failed. Had all priests been like Benedict it would have succeeded. Vatican II was a recognition that, if things were to remain the same, everything must change. Benedict was an exemplar: he had the cultural tradition of priests formed before the Council, and the interpersonal humility that the Church expected of those formed after it. More often, though, things worked the other way: priests were granted their privileges and absolved from imparting anything. With Vatican II the Church built an ark that parishioners decided they would rather drown than board.

Benedict saw that, for more and more people, the Church’s “model for life is apparently unconvincing. . . . It seems to have been surpassed by ‘science’ and to be out-of-step with the rationalism of the modern era.” But only apparently. Showing that the Church was not as irrelevant as it looked required making sophisticated arguments about history and civilization, about being and seeming.

That was Benedict’s gift. Blunt, brilliant, humble, he was a bridge between simplicity and complexity. His four volumes of interviews with the German journalist Peter Seewald will be read for a very long time. Seewald, Catholic by upbringing, had left the Church, less through “lapsing” or “drifting” than out of skepticism and cynicism. Although these conversations would draw Seewald back into the church, his questions can be probing and snide. (“But anyone can see that the wine remains wine. . .”) Here the “simplicity” of Benedict is not that of an intellectual who has succeeded in making his theories intelligible to a dim layman. It is that of a witness under cross-examination whose story is holding up.

The time is approaching when all direct memory of the Church as it existed before Vatican II will have disappeared, bringing a need for the Church to look back as well as forward. The week Benedict resigned in early 2013, the aged Spanish cardinal Julián Herranz Casado compared him to the early Christians, and said that coming popes ought to be in Benedict’s mold. “The church fathers did two basic things,” said Cardinal Herranz. “They knew and loved Christ and they taught the first Christians to live fully as their baptism required, amidst a pagan society.” He added: “The circumstances of today’s world are not very different.”

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books.

Paul Scalia

Joseph Ratzinger’s enemies dubbed him “God’s Rottweiler” and the “Panzer Cardinal.” They couldn’t see his doctrinal clarity as anything other than hostility. Unfortunately, his friends didn’t help much either. The Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club, which proclaimed that he had been “putting the smackdown on heresy since 1981,” fell into the same trap as his naysayers. They just happened to like it. And in the early Nineties, I was a proud member of this latter group. Four years at a Jesuit college had made me long to see the correction of so many errors. A smackdown was needed, I thought. But in the seminary a brief, chance encounter with cardinal Ratzinger shook me from that view and helped me appreciate not only his true gifts but also the glory of the truth.

My Old Testament seminar professor, the Dutch priest Father Goswin Habets, had been a student of Ratzinger. One morning after Mass, Father Habets introduced us seminarians to the Cardinal as he was crossing Saint Peter’s Square. Here he was, the man whose writings I had been reading for years, who had been smacking down heresy. I suppose I expected something like a theological Clint Eastwood—leather-skinned, steely-eyed, perhaps with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Instead, I encountered a disarmingly kind, gentle, and refined man. The disconnect was too great. I had to rethink everything.

The point is that Ratzinger was neither a Rottweiler nor one who laid smackdowns. He was a spiritual father who taught the truth out of love for souls. His work was priestly in the ancient Roman sense of the word pontifex, “bridge builder.” The priest bridges the chasm between God and man, the divine and the human, the eternal and temporal. Ratzinger exercised an apostolate of intellectual bridge-building. He sought to bring together those intellectual principles that modernity had put asunder. Where modern thought had divided different truths, Ratzinger sought to reveal their union and harmony.

First, as regards truth and love. The modern mind is plagued by the notion that these two things are not only separate but deeply opposed to one another. In fact, they are not only compatible but deeply dependent. Each one withers without the other. Truth without love becomes hostility because it lacks its proper purpose, the good of the human person. Love without truth becomes an absurdity. For Ratzinger, the separation of truth and love is not just an intellectual error. It’s a threat to the soul. Their union is deeply salvific. “Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral,” he wrote in 1986. The Church’s saving doctrine and the human heart are meant for one another. It’s our rebellion that has set them at odds. Ratzinger possessed the peaceful confidence that the Church’s doctrine is ordered toward the good of man and that the human heart in turn is open and longing for the truth. This needs to be the operating principle of all priestly ministry.

This union is a matter of salvation because it’s ultimately about Jesus Christ. “Truth and love coincide in Christ,” Ratzinger proclaimed in the Mass prior to his election as pope. “To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended.” His thinking on this was completed and crystallized by his faith in Christ.

In a similar manner, Ratzinger approached another division in need of healing, that of faith and reason. The ancients and medievals saw these as complementary. Our society, on the other hand, thinks that faith is a crutch for the uneducated and that the learned have no need of religion. Reason liberates people from the shackles of faith, while faith threatens the advance of reason. Ratzinger’s entire ministry can be seen as an effort to bridge this gap, to reconcile these two ways of knowing.

Commemorating the tenth anniversary of his predecessor’s Encyclical Fides et ratio, Benedict observed, “The truth of Revelation does not superimpose the truth achieved by reason; rather, it purifies and exalts reason.” In his first encyclical, Deus caritas est, he wrote, “The Church has an indirect duty here, in that she is called to contribute to the purification of reason and to the reawakening of those moral forces without which just structures are neither established nor prove effective in the long run.” Faith is not a flight from or an assault on reason but its necessary companion and purification.

Perhaps most dear to Benedict’s heart was bridging the gap between the past and the present. Modernity had severed them from one another. Modern man knew better than all his ancestors. He’d been freed from the backwards and oppressive past. Many in the Church had imbibed this progressive view, especially in their reception of the Second Vatican Council.

Early in his pontificate, Benedict spoke about the need to view the Church’s life according to the “hermeneutic of continuity.” In many regards this was simply a matter of piety, that reverence for what has come before and the desire to bring it to bear in the present. What the Church held true and sacred in the past she still holds today. The past wasn’t to be judged according to the present but the present in light of the past. In his own person, Joseph Ratzinger showed the union of these things. He himself was a man who loved and sought the truth not only for itself but for souls. A devout Catholic steeped in the Church’s teaching, he was also one of the most learned men of his time, thus showing in himself that union of faith and reason. As a pious son of the Church, he treasured the Church’s tradition precisely because it teaches us how to live here and now, and beyond.

Father Paul Scalia is pastor of Saint James Catholic Church in Falls Church, Virginia.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider

With the death of Pope Benedict XVI, many Catholics felt that they lost a clear and sure point of reference for their faith. One can have the sensation of being an orphaned child. Benedict was a pope who put at the center of his personal life and of the life of the Church the supernatural view of the faith and of the perennial validity of the holy tradition of the Church, which constitutes the source and the pillar of our faith together with the Holy Scripture. In this sense the greatest and most beneficial act of his pontificate was the motu proprio Summorum pontificum, which fully restored the traditional Latin liturgy in all its expression: Holy Mass, sacraments, and all the other sacred rites. This pontifical act will go down in history as epoch-making.

Benedict states that the traditional rite of the Holy Mass was never abrogated and should remain always in the Church because what was holy for our forefathers and the saints must be holy for us and the future generations as well. At a time where within the Church there was a radical rejection of the millennium-old liturgical rite of the Holy Mass (and therefore a rupture with the principle of the tradition itself), the pontificate of Benedict was worthwhile if only for his having issued Summorum pontificum. With it began the healing of the wound in the Body of the Church, the wound which was caused by the attitude of rejection and hatred of the venerable rule of the prayer of the Church.

In his “Spiritual Testament,” released at his death, Benedict left this short, but substantial phrase, which I consider the most important of all: “Stand firm in the faith! Do not be confused!” We witness in our day and in the life of the Church a process of a dilution of the faith—adaptation to the spirit of heretics, unbelievers, and apostates by specious and euphonic names and through the abuse of the canonical institution of a synod. Such a situation is demoralizing for all faithful Catholics. Benedict’s two legacies, these final words and Summorum pontificum, remain a light, an encouragement, and a consolation. This pope was strong in faith, a true lover of the nonperishable beauty and firmness of the traditional rite of the Holy Mass; he gave primacy to prayer, to the supernatural view, and to eternity. This legacy will persist thanks to the intervention of Divine Providence, which never abandons His Church.

Athanasius Schneider, O.R.C. is the auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan.


Brian Daley

Since the late nineteenth century, especially, the bishops of Rome have exercised their teaching authority more and more by writing letters of instruction for the whole Church: encyclicals, as they have come to be known, since they are meant to be sermons or instructions not just for the local community in Rome but for all Chriistian believers. They are usually known by the first three or four words of their official Latin text. Pope Benedict produced three in his short pontificate. The first of these major encyclicals, Deus caritas est, deals with the central role of selfless love in the life of Christian faith, as a mirror of God’s presence among us, because “God is love,” as Saint John writes. The second was called Spe salvi, “saved in hope,” and deals with the centrality of the virtue of hope, as giving direction to the life of faith. His third great encyclical, Caritas in veritate, which means “love in truth,” really discusses the relationship of Christian love to faith itself, of loving God and each other to knowing who and what God is. Taken together, these three papal teaching letters form a deep and continuous reflection on the relation of the central virtues of the Christian life—love, hope, and faith—to what the Church constantly teaches, and show together how the spiritual life, practice, and faith are related to each other at their core.

I think one ought to regard these three encyclicals as together forming one continuous, profound reflection on what the Church teaches the world, what the Church calls us all to do and to be. They belong together, and could all be taken as sections of a single great book or treatise—Joseph Ratzinger’s last and most profound work of systematic, moral, and practical theology. To my mind, this body of his papal teachings forms the real substance of his lasting contribution to the faith of the Catholic Church.

Father Brian Daley, S. J. is the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and was the recipient of a Ratzinger Prize for Theology in 2012.

Jon Tveit

Our late Holy Father’s death and obsequies helped to resolve his complicated legacy. I loved him dearly as a spiritual father, one who was fundamental in my coming to the faith and later in finding my vocation. Ever since he abdicated the papacy a decade ago, however, it had been difficult to think of him. It was painful because I felt abandoned, like a son whose father left home for a new life, casting off his duties to his wife and children. Those who have endured such a situation with their biological father might object to the comparison, yet in a very real way our father left us. I realized upon his death that for ten years I had buried the memory of his papacy because the recollection was too sore.

As I read tributes far more erudite and apposite than this one, I allowed myself to return for the first time in a decade to his preaching reminded me of the atmosphere of his reign. Optimistic. Encouraging to a young Catholic. I began to accept the faith given to me in infancy not long before Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI. It became clear to me that this faith was reasonable and something that could be accepted by a reasonable person, which of course Benedict manifested so well in his writings and in his life. It is natural that faith in Jesus Christ Who is the Logos Incarnate should be logical. And that our worship of Him too should be reasonable, a logike latreia, according to the Pauline phrase so dear to the Holy Father, an oblationem rationabilem. Immersing myself in the traditional Mass thanks to Benedict’s liturgical peace, I fell in love with the Lord and His Church for the first time, so deeply in fact that I soon decided to give my life to Him and Her completely.

In his intellectual life, Benedict has sometimes been called the Mozart of theology, because, as Cardinal Meisner of Cologne put it, “He manages masterfully to transform the notes of the Gospel into thrilling music.” It was his thrilling rendition of our Lord’s Good News that attracted me to the faith more than almost anything else. I had rejected the beige, “gather us in” American Catholicism of my youth, which I associated rightly or wrongly with the papacy of John Paul II. This new pope helped me to hear for the first time the music of the Word made flesh in all its splendor.

The first book of Ratzinger’s which I read was a slim volume of writings from his time at the C.D.F. called On the Way to Jesus Christ. He speaks in one chapter of the beauty of the God-man, applying to Him the words of Psalm 45: “You are the fairest of the children of men.” The beauty of the Redeemer is not merely external; “rather, the beauty of truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself, who powerfully draws us and inflicts on us the wound of Love.” Jesus Christ, Truth and Goodness itself, is eminently id quod visum placet, according to one of the Angelic Doctor’s definitions of beauty, that which pleases when seen. And this beauty is almost infallibly attractive to those with eyes to see it. Benedict helped me to see it.

Many spoke in early 2013 and have continued since to speak of the humility of the resignation, but, although I believe Benedict was in fact a man of profound humility, the particular decision of his abdication seemed to me bafflingly un-humble. “No one is truly humble,” writes Pope Saint Gregory the Great, “if he understands by the judgment of the supreme Will that he ought to govern but then refuses.” Ratzinger had a front-row seat in the declining years of his sainted predecessor. Could he not have learned the lesson that meeting the challenges of duty frailly is more powerful than passing the duty to someone younger and stronger? After all, we are followers of One Whose work seemed a failure in the eyes of the world. Yet is it really for me to judge the late Holy Father and the inner workings of his discernment? Maybe it was humility that induced his decision. Maybe he knew himself and the Lord’s Will well enough that his decision was the correct one, that in fact it was not the judgment of the supreme Will that he continue to govern. If I shared his humility, perhaps I would understand this better.

Benedict’s death is a great loss to this world (while please God a gain to the one above), but his absence does rather simplify things for us. It closes an open wound. Somehow I can remember the papacy of the late Benedict XVI more fondly than I could that of the pope emeritus.

Father Jon Tveit is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

Rémi Brague

Benedict XVI was a theologian, which is hardly traditional in a pope, hence, not to be taken for granted. The pope who came before him was a philosopher, which is not common either. As a rule, popes were rather students of canon law, familiar with the functioning of this huge machine. Philosophy and theology were the business of university professors who taught in Paris, Oxford, Louvain, etc., not in Rome. (I should add that both popes began their careers as teachers.)

In Patristic times, the theologians were bishops whose task was to formulate the creed in the most accurate way in order to preach, not their own whims, but the truth that had been entrusted to them. This is what people like the three great Cappadocians in the East or Augustine in the West spent their lives doing. One could say that the fact that a theologian became bishop—and not just any bishop, but the bishop who pledges for the communion of all bishops—was hardly more than a return to an early state of affairs.

What I find especially interesting in Benedict’s life work is a general atmosphere or method, if you prefer. I mean what he called the “hermeneutics of continuity.” He thought first of a way to interpret and implement the last council. But as a backdrop, this implied a whole attitude towards the past of the Church and a catholic (in the secular meaning of this adjective) understanding of tradition: throwing everything into the melting pot, from the Bible and the Church Fathers (in his case, Augustine had pride of place) to the great Scholastics (Bonaventure along with Aquinas), to recent thinkers such as Newman or Rosmini, and even to contemporary people such as von Balthasar. As a matter of course, this could scarcely be possible without a tremendous breadth of knowledge.

In his theological work, Ratzinger, before and after his election to the chair of Peter, was always careful to tell what we can and should confess with certainty from more or less probable conjectures. This is especially the case in his short treatise on last things, death, the soul, Heaven, etc. He was exactly as humble and unassuming when he was writing theology as he was in everyday life.

Rémi Brague is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Arabic Philosophy at the University of Paris. Portions of this submission appeared in Polish on the website of Teologia Polityczna.

Urban Hannon

Once when I was in monastic life, a well-meaning benefactor who did not understand how common property works decided to donate fifty copies of the same book: Cardinal Sarah’s first, God or Nothing. No one was quite sure what to do with all of them, and I imagine forty-nine were eventually re-gifted or offered to Goodwill. But first our superiors decided to give one to each seminarian and ask all of us to read it. Later that week, when I got back to my cell after Compline, I found a piece of paper stuck to my door frame with a magnet, as was our custom for notes between the confreres. It was not signed, but I quickly figured out that it was from one of my fellow novices, the seminarian with by far the wittiest and driest sense of humor in the abbey. On one side was a Xerox of a page from God or Nothing, with a line highlighted in which Cardinal Sarah had said something to the effect of: “Mark my words, not only will Pope Benedict XVI be canonized, but one day he will be named a doctor of the Church.” On the other side was a Xerox of the book’s back cover, this time with the highlighting on a section of the first endorsement blurb, which read: “All that you have written . . . is especially relevant and profound. ~Pope Benedict XVI.”

The phrase “God or nothing” serves as a good summary of Pope Benedict’s theological legacy as well. For Benedict, the primacy of God was both the most important truth and the truth our age was most at risk of forgetting. Perhaps this explains why Benedict devoted a papal encyclical to each of the three theological virtues (granted, the last of these was completed and promulgated by his successor)—the theological virtues being, precisely, the three habits of the human soul that have God himself for their object. Faith is believing God about God, hope is trusting God to bring us to God, and charity is loving God for the sake of God. Taken together, then, Deus caritas est, Spe salvi, and Lumen fidei, represent Pope Benedict’s attempt to call our wandering attention back to the heart of our holy religion, to refocus our spiritual powers of mind and will on the God Who fashioned these powers in the first place, and in Whom alone they can come to rest.

Outside of this series, Benedict’s only other encyclical is Caritas in veritate, a social encyclical that in less capable hands might have become merely humanitarian. But Benedict knew well that the second commandment is like the first, that love of neighbor is intimately connected to love of God, as its natural consequence and earthly expression. “A humanism which excludes God,” Caritas in veritate declares, “is an inhuman humanism.” Thus the conclusion to Benedict’s foray into Catholic social doctrine opens with the line: “Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is.” At its most practical, Benedict’s theology still maintains a speculative primacy, confident that nothing is more practical than the contemplation of God.

The Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is obviously Christocentric, but for exactly that reason it is also Theocentric, because Jesus is God. I confess that these books are not among my favorites of Pope Benedict’s writings, but I think that is because I am not really in their target audience. A seminary professor described them once as “hundreds of pages just to get to a conclusion that ought to have been a premise.” But here again, the primacy of God shines through, this time in the context of apologetics for German scripture scholars. There are plenty of beautiful insights in all three volumes for the rest of us too, but Benedict’s stated purpose is to use good scriptural criticism to overcome the errors of bad scriptural criticism. He is trying to conquer the skepticism of his fellow countrymen, and so remove the obstacles that are keeping them from Christ in his fullness, which is to say, from God.

Pope Benedict’s constant focus on God made him a great theologian, but maybe also the least creative theologian of his generation. After all, theologians had always focused on God—it’s what made them theologians in the first place. In other ways Benedict was very much a man of his age, but he did a better job than his contemporaries at resisting their characteristic temptation to originality. While Rahner was busy re-centering theology on man, and Balthasar was busy re-centering theology on Balthasar, Ratzinger kept his theological gaze fixed on God. Perhaps this is why there has never really been a Ratzingerian school, parallel to the Rahnerians and Balthasarians: he was not groundbreaking or idiosyncratic enough to set off a whole new movement, nor did he want to be. Nevertheless—or rather for that very reason—I expect his writings to be read in the Church long after his fellow Nouvelle Theologians are forgotten. Benedict’s thought has a timelessness that their “signs of the times” theologies do not.

The most important part of Pope Benedict XVI’s legacy will surely be his words and deeds on behalf of the sacred liturgy. It is also here, in the realm of liturgy, that the “God or nothing” quality to Benedict’s theology becomes most pronounced. “If the liturgy appears first of all as the workshop for our activity,” he writes, “then what is essential is being forgotten: God. For the liturgy is not about us, but about God. Forgetting about God is the most imminent danger of our age. As against this, the liturgy should be setting up a sign of God’s presence. Yet what is happening, if the habit of forgetting about God makes itself at home in the liturgy itself, and if in the liturgy we are only thinking of ourselves? In any and every liturgical reform, and every liturgical celebration,” Pope Benedict concludes, “the primacy of God should be kept in view first and foremost.”

Urban Hannon’s writing has appeared in First Things, Ethika Politika, and other publications. He currently studies theology in Rome.

Ambrose 
Dobrozsi

I don’t know that I could write a sufficient amount to describe the impact Pope Benedict XVI has had on my life. Right as I was starting to think about the issues of the faith for myself, in my sophomore year of high school, he was elected pope, and my homeschool family started to read his work so that we could get to know our new Holy Father. Throughout my life, it has been his works that have set the defining standard for what theology is supposed to be. I am certainly not theologian enough to give fitting tribute to the enduring fruit that his academic work will certainly bear in the life of the Church.

But I think, more than his towering intellectual accomplishments, it was his simplicity, faith, and the union between his thought and his prayer that have benefited me the most. The problem of how those were all supposed to fit has been one of the defining struggles of my Catholic faith. In C.C.D. classes as a kid, I remember struggling to understand the teachers’ reprimand that I couldn’t just give answers from our textbooks. I’m sure their intention was good—memorized answers don’t substitute for a personal relationship with the Lord. But from a young age, I wanted to know the right answers, and I loved understanding things. Love and knowledge went together, and I couldn’t form any strong feelings about things I didn’t know backwards and forwards. The idea of a personal relationship with Jesus that didn’t primarily consist in knowing all the right answers about Who He is didn’t make sense to me. This struggle between knowledge, will, and desire only became more complicated when I was a young adult, and I discovered that I really wanted things that I knew were wrong, and that the mere knowledge of their immorality didn’t keep me from doing them.

It’s possible that I would have never found a way forward from these inner contradictions without the witness of Pope Benedict. Not only was he clearly so good and holy while also being so piercingly insightful, he was also able to say exactly what I needed to hear to integrate my desire for the truth with my passions and will. I remember driving south on I-71 towards downtown Cincinnati one evening shortly after I graduated college, listening to Catholic radio. I have no memory of what program, or who was talking, but the host quoted Benedict, describing the core of Catholic life as learning to see the world from God’s perspective. At the time, I thought it was a great idea, but its profound implications took a long time to unfold. My desire for truth did not have its end in answers, but rather in a Person, Who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Learning the truth is not to learn things, but rather to recognize Him, and to see everything in proper relation to Him.

There were many points where this central insight unfolded through the years, but I remember a particularly poignant one in seminary while I was struggling to figure out how to really pray. When I read Benedict’s A School of Prayer: The Saints Show Us How to Pray, it transformed the way I thought about it. Before that text, as a beginner, I was focused on my actions—whether I was distracted, what kind of emotions prayer produced in my soul, or whether the words I was using to talk to God were true. Pope Benedict’s approach started from the opposite side: what was God doing when I prayed? There are countless examples of this throughout the text, but one that particularly struck me was his discussion of the passage in Genesis where Abraham tries to talk God out of destroying Sodom as punishment for its sins. The way I had interpreted it before focused on Abraham’s actions. This leads to the obvious interpretation that God is angry, but Abraham wants God to be merciful so he goes about bargaining with God, eventually getting Him to relent. The implications are worse: if it requires so much effort on Abraham’s part to get God to not destroy people, what kind of loving God could this be?

The same central insight I learned from Benedict provides a way into the depths of the true mercy at the heart of this exchange between Abraham and God. In A School of Prayer, Pope Benedict flips the script: God must want Abraham to pray for Sodom. He explains:

This is the power of prayer. For through intercession, the prayer to God for the salvation of others, the desire for salvation which God nourishes for sinful man is demonstrated and expressed. . . . It is this divine desire itself which becomes in prayer the desire of the human being and is expressed through the words of intercession. With his entreaty, Abraham is lending his voice, and also his heart, to the divine will. God’s desire is mercy and love as well as the wish to save; and this desire of God found in Abraham and in his prayer the possibility of being revealed concretely in human history.

God’s desire all along is for salvation. In prayer, Abraham’s heart joins God’s own heart in longing for the repentance and life of the people in Sodom, even though they had been cruel to his nephew Lot. God permits this exchange because He wants Abraham to participate in the mercy He desires for Sodom, lifting Abraham closer to Himself, and providing a way to offer mercy to humanity from inside.

I will forever be indebted to Benedict for this understanding. Seeing God’s movement first, understanding my work as a priest not as my own initiative but a response to God’s call, working through my time in prayer not as my desire to become holy but as God giving me the chance to love what He loves and to learn to see what He sees—so much has come from what I learned through Pope Benedict’s example.

Father Ambrose Dobrozsi is a priest in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.

Archbishop 
Thomas Wenski

In his “Spiritual Testament,” written in August 2006, Pope Benedict XVI noted that many of the various ideologies that alleged that the Church was dated, out of step, or wrong in her teachings had collapsed with the changing generations. These ideologies inspired by liberalism, existentialism, or Marxism were only merely “a tangle of hypotheses” out of which the reasonableness of faith has emerged (and is still emerging). “Jesus Christ,” he affirmed, “is truly the Way, the Truth and the Life and Church, in all her shortcomings, is truly His Body.”

Joseph Ratzinger was a priest, a bishop, a cardinal, and a pope. He was also a brilliant intellectual and scholar who served as a peritus during the Second Vatican Council. He lived through the tragedy of the Second World War and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the aggiornamento of the post-Vatican II era. In his writings, in his preaching, in his life dedicated to Christ, he witnessed to the reasonableness of faith standing strong against what he called “the dictatorship of relativism” or what his successor, Pope Francis would term as “ideological colonization.” His overriding priority was to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God.

In 2007, he presided over the meeting of bishops in Brazil. The document that emerged from the meeting—which Jorge Bergoglio had a hand in writing—anticipated Pope Francis’s inaugural apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, the Joy of the Gospel. In that document the phrase “missionary disciples” figured predominantly. But Benedict insisted that the phrase was incomplete, for it begged the question, “Why?” So he provided the answer: “disciples and missionaries of Christ so that our people will have life in Him.”

In other words, as Pope Benedict has said—and Pope Francis has repeated—Christianity is not an ideology; it is not merely a moral system; it is above all a relationship with a person, Jesus Christ.

Thus, missionary disciples have encountered Jesus through a personal experience of the love and presence of God. As a result of this encounter, they have chosen to say “yes”—to surrender to God’s love and God’s will for their life. They allow their entire life to be transformed by this relationship. Ratzinger was truly such a missionary disciple. He taught us that “to be a Christian is not a burden but a gift; to have encountered the Lord is the best thing that has ever happened to us, and to share him with others is our joy.”

Thomas Wenski is archbishop of Miami.

Robert Wyllie

The largest gathering in Australian history occurred fifteen years ago when George Cardinal Pell welcomed Benedict XVI as he disembarked from a white yacht at Barangaroo. Three days later, under a temporary red pavilion emblazoned with a great white bird at Randwick Racecourse in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, the pope said Mass.

In his homily, Pope Benedict described the materially prosperous world as a “spiritual desert.” Those who conform to the spirit of the age, he said, waver between a desperate search for meaning in life and indifference. Many live with “a quiet sense of despair.” The Holy Father exhorted the crowd towards prayer. Prayer, he said, is “pure receptivity” to the “pure gift” of the Holy Spirit, God’s “love in action.” Prayer empowers us with the Holy Spirit to become the “salt and light” to preserve and guide our fellows and live fulfilling lives.

I was then certainly a Catholic but uncertainly Christian, a nineteen-year-old with a little learning and less faith. Though generously formed in the best of parishes and schools, I had somehow consciously adopted a regulative cliché: “A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall.” Pope Benedict taught me there is no substitute to deep roots, ever stretching through our Scripture and tradition to find God’s love. And not only me. Like his predecessor, Benedict XVI led the Church primarily as a teacher. He did not inspire as much popular devotion as John Paul II, but then again, every day of our lives need not be like World Youth Day. Benedict was a teacher of teachers. His three encyclicals, the most erudite ever written, go back to the basics: faith, hope, and love.

More than his predecessor, he was a scholarly teacher. He was Joseph Ratzinger, the great pastoral theologian who plumbed tradition and Scripture to regift their buried treasures to the modern church. From Bonaventure, an “inner-worldly, inner-historical messianic hope” that the fullness of revelation is even now being progressively revealed in history. A detail from Introduction to Christianity: Europe’s place in this history revealed to Saint Paul in his dream of the Macedonian in Acts 16. In Daughter Zion: Mary as the name of the Eternal Feminine, the true embodiment of the female figure of divine wisdom in the Old Testament. From In the Beginning: the exiled Jews asserting against the Babylonians that other than God there is only a void, no dragon-body of the world from which the priest-kings of Marduk must deliver our tainted blood. Philosophy of history, die ewig Weibliche, God-as-Reason—a German signature on the mind of the Church.

Benedict’s closing homily at Randwick Racecourse stayed on my mind; perhaps not coincidentally, my studies continued longer than I thought they would at that time. A couple of years later, I would be struck by the critique of despair and call for receptivity in Søren Kierkegaard. Later still, in graduate school, I would be struck by the great critique of receptivity and its dangers in a very different Benedict by the last name Spinoza. Throughout this time, friends wished to discuss the aforementioned points of Ratzinger’s pastoral theology.

In the beginning of Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger retells a fable of Kierkegaard’s. A clown comes from the next village, shouting about a fire. Nobody believes him because he is wearing motley. They think it is a joke. This, Ratzinger writes, is the predicament of the theologian in the modern world. Indeed, apparently Caritas in veritate makes more radical claims about economics, the environment, and world government than we can ever seriously credit to anyone wearing red shoes and a capello romano. Alas, even the best articulation of the truth is not guaranteed to reform global institutions, not the marketplace, not even the Church.

So he resigned. Then Cardinal Pell went to prison on trumped-up charges. In the next decade we saw that, in the wealthy lands of Australia, Europe, and North America, the Church has more enemies than despair and more sources of corruption than indifference. Her shepherds need to be more than simply teachers, and guard the flock from more than error and spiritual dryness alone. We need to hold the lessons of Joseph Ratzinger in our hearts as we grow in prayer and charity, especially those of us who are teachers. Yet we should remember another more humbling lesson of Benedict XVI’s papacy also: the Church needs statesmen still.

Robert Wyllie is assistant professor of political science at Ashland University and a contributing editor at The Lamp.

Richard 
Cipolla

It was through the generosity of Saint John Paul II that, against all expectations, I was ordained a Catholic priest. As a priest in the Episcopal Church for eleven years, I discovered the power of beauty in the liturgy, and most importantly I discovered the person and writings of Saint John Henry Newman. The doctrinal collapse of the Episcopal Church in the 1970s and 1980s was the incentive for my decision to apply to my local bishop for entrance into the Catholic Church and to ask for ordination as a Catholic priest under the pastoral provision that was initiated with such grace by Pope John Paul II, which allowed married Episcopal priests to be ordained Catholic priests. After study and discernment, I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1984, not the best time for a Catholic priest who associated liturgy with beauty and transcendence and whose preparation for the Sunday homily (not sermon) began on the previous Monday, in imitation of Newman.

The first ten years of my priesthood were difficult. It seemed that the reasons why I became Catholic were under attack as irrelevant to the age, the two decades after the Second Vatican Council. It was in these rather dark days that I discovered the writings of Cardinal Ratzinger, especially those when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Faith. His obvious love of the person of Jesus Christ shone brightly in his writings, even in the more difficult of his books books such as Principles of Catholic Theology. His understanding of and insistence on adherence to the tradition of the Church in theology and liturgy was a rock for me in a time when the very word “tradition” was mocked as irrelevant in illis temporibus by both clergy and laity.

It was during this time that I also discovered Romano Guardini’s little book The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in 1930. It had a huge influence on my understanding not only of the traditional Roman Mass but also of the very essence of Catholic worship and of the purpose and experience of the Church’s worship in the Mass. To my delight, Ratzinger took the title and the spirit of Guardini’s book and wrote his own Spirit of the Liturgy in 2000. In his preface introducing the contents of the book, Ratzinger wrote:

My purpose here is to assist this renewal of understanding of the Liturgy. Its basic intentions coincide with what Guardini wanted to achieve. The only difference is that I have had to translate what Guardini did at the end of the First World War, in a totally different historical situation, into the context of our present-day questions, hopes, and dangers. Like Guardini, I am not attempting to involve myself with scholarly discussion and research. I am simply offering an aid to the understanding of the faith and to the right way to give the faith its central form of expression in the Liturgy.

Guardini died in 1968, a few years after the Second Vatican Council. Shortly before his death he called the Novus Ordo Mass promulgated by Saint Paul VI “plumber’s work,” an uninspired and “botched job” of reform. But Guardini, très avant garde with respect to the liturgy in the time between the two world wars of the twentieth century, seems to have been convinced by the time of his death that liturgy itself was becoming impossible in the culture of a denatured and secularized “modern man.” Ratzinger’s Spirit of the Liturgy not only denied Guardini’s dark assessment of the future of the liturgy in the Church. The Cardinal Prefect also, while pointing out the problems with the Novus Ordo and especially its implementation, strongly asserted that the worship of the Church in the Mass is at the very heart of the Catholic tradition. He showed how music and ceremony and art are intrinsic to the development and celebration of the liturgy. He saw clearly that at the heart of the Mass is the beauty of the person of Jesus Christ. In the Mass eternity is brought into time as the life-giving sacrifice of Jesus Christ is made present in praise and thanksgiving and the living Christ gives Himself as food for His people.

I was in Rome some years ago and had made a breakfast appointment with a priest friend of mine who was living there completing advanced studies. I told him that we would meet at the obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square at 7:00 A.M. I arrived a bit early and stood at the obelisk watching for my friend. Suddenly I saw a priest in a plain black cassock walking from the Borgo side of the piazza towards me. As he approached, I recognized him with his shock of white hair. It was Cardinal Ratzinger. I tried to quickly figure out what I should do—play it cool and just offer a nod and a “Buon giorno, Eminenza.” Or whether I should express my deep appreciation for his presence in my life through his writings, in beautifully phrased Italian or even English, in which he was fluent. As he approached the obelisk I was choked up and could hardly speak. I knelt on the paving stones of the piazza, looked up to him, and asked for his blessing. He smiled and gave me his blessing and then proceeded through the piazza on his way to his office in the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio.

Father Richard Cipolla is a priest in the Diocese of Bridgeport.

Jacob 
Rees-Mogg

Pope Benedict XVI may be seen by history as a great pope, not just an interesting one. In a partnership, started with the election of Saint Pope John Paul II and ended by his abdication in 2013, Pope Benedict was a rock upon which the Church was built. As the successor to Saint Peter he was following Christ’s command. Benedict’s greatness lay in his intellect and his valiance for truth. He was not a dogmatic traditionalist but an admired theologian. This mattered, for in each generation the Church must win the intellectual argument as well as point to authority and tradition.

The success of the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century in rejuvenating a tired Christianity was based upon its intellectual rigor. Benedict was trying to do the same for the twenty-first century. This was not by accepting the nostrums of the secular world but by explaining the revealed truth of Christ. The world is not perfect, but that does not mean that the pilgrimage towards perfection should be abandoned by accepting an “anything goes” culture. Benedict indicated this in his liturgical preferences, seeing in the traditional rites of the Church a beauty that lifts the hearts of the faithful to God better than the mundane ordinariness of less solemn practice. He made it explicit in his encyclicals, emphasizing the love of God as the road towards salvation.

Both Benedict and Saint John Paul challenged the basis of atheistic modernity with clarity and certainty. Their greatness lies in the prospect of ultimate success through the rejuvenation of the Christian faith. The interest is in the gloomy fear that it was the last gasp for truth.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has been a Member of Parliament for North East Somerset since 2010.


John Hunwicke

Some of Joseph Ratzinger’s liturgical arguments uncannily resemble the considered conclusions of the late, distinguished, “Catholic Anglican” liturgist Prebendary Michael Moreton of Exeter. Writing to me in 2001, Moreton said: “I regard the Roman Canon as part of the complex of traditions which characterized the life of the Church as it emerged from the centuries of persecution: a shared rule of faith in the creeds, a shared rule of what constituted Scripture, a shared rule of holy order, and a shared rule of prayer. I do not believe that any part of the Church in later centuries has any authority to alter these canons.

“One has to distinguish, I think, between legality and authority in the Eucharistic Prayer. Getting on for thirty eucharistic prayers have had legality conferred upon them in as many years in the Church of England, which shows how confused Anglican are in this matter. But the Roman Canon has an authority which it shares with the Canon of Scripture, the Canon of Faith, and canonical order.”

The “papalist” wing of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England, who so very much disliked being called “High Church,” had, long ago, detected that the “Prayer Book” liturgy had been forcibly thrust upon their Church by the Tudors, with no pretense of consent. They now came to realize that the entire Tudor “Settlement” could be impugned on the grounds of its lack of legitimacy. One influential book explained that “it would have been ultra vires for a Provincial Synod to abrogate a rite which had the prescriptive use with a thousand years behind it in the West.”

Cardinal Ratzinger, as so often, got there too. In his “Ten Years of the Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei,” of October 24, 1998, he recalled that “Cardinal Newman observed, that the Church, throughout her history, has never abolished nor forbidden orthodox liturgical forms, which would be quite alien to the Spirit of the Church. . . . The orthodox forms of a rite are living realities, born out of the dialogue of love between the Church and her Lord. . . . Such rites can die, if those who have used them in a particular era should disappear, or if the life-situation of those same people should change.” What may surprise some readers is that the teaching to which Ratzinger alludes was the teaching of Newman when he was still an Anglican. (Likely a surprise to Newman too!)

In his parochial and plain sermons, Newman observed of liturgical forms that “long use has made them divine to us: for the spirit of religion has so penetrated and quickened them that to destroy them is, in respect to the multitude of men, to unsettle and dislodge the religious principle in itself. In most minds usage has so identified them with the notion of religion, that the one cannot be extirpated without the other. . . . things indifferent in themselves become important to us when we are used to them. . . . things, viewed as a whole, are sacred relatively to us, even if they were not, as they are, divinely sanctioned. . . . in the case of. . . . forms, even the least binding in themselves, it continually happens that a speculative improvement is a practical folly, and the wise are taken in their own craftiness.”

A Benedictine, Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman, discusses in the Douai Magazine of 2021 some points made by the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben. For him, Benedict XVI’s abdication was a courageous attempt to expose modernity’s lost awareness of the distinction between legitimacy and legality. The rise of legal overreach in institutions is, for Agamben, the result of their failure to comprehend and embrace the source of their proper legitimacy. Legitimacy cannot be authenticated by the making of regulations, and the modern reliance on the use of regulation betrays a loss of legitimacy. In other words, the loss of legitimacy in today’s institutions cannot be remedied by the hypertrophy of law, and an increasingly excessive reliance on enacting regulations to deal with every challenge merely betrays “the loss of all substantial legitimacy.” Be it in Church or State, the attempt to legitimate power by acts of law is vain.

Father John Hunwicke is a priest of the personal ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Sir Edward Leigh

One of the privileges of four decades serving as a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom is the familiarity one acquires with places of ancient and matchless historical importance. The Palace of Westminster, where Parliament convenes, was among the first creations of William the Conqueror when he came over from Normandy a millennium ago. Its Great Hall has witnessed coronation banquets, the trials of great and once-mighty men, the lying-in-state of anointed monarchs, and countless other affairs of government.

It is also where, in 2010, the House of Commons and House of Lords along with diplomats, academics, business leaders, and others welcomed a venerable 83-year-old Bavarian theologian who happened to be the Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. In his address on that day, Benedict XVI hailed the “profound influence” this place has had on the development of participative government, especially in the Commonwealth and English-speaking world. He recalled that it was here in this very hall where Saint Thomas More, sometime Speaker of the Commons and Lord Chancellor of England, was put on trial and condemned to death. More sought to be “the King’s good servant” but could not betray his conscience in assenting to Henry VIII’s usurpation of spiritual power over the Church.

Benedict reminded us that the fundamental questions that arose in More’s trial were ever-present today in a time of rapidly changing social conditions: “Each generation, as it seeks to advance the common good, must ask anew: what are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend?” His question remained just as fresh a decade later when, for the first time ever in a land accustomed to freedom, all public worship was banned temporarily in response to the coronavirus.

More fundamentally, the pope prodded the consciences of ministers and MPs about the very basis of how we, whose very vocation in life is to decide, make our decisions. “If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident,” Benedict said. “Herein lies the real challenge for democracy.”

The expansion of the economy into areas and practices without any firm moral foundation, he reminded us, had contributed to grave difficulties for millions of people throughout the world. He encouraged us to express our solidarity with the poor, not just on a national level here in Britain but on a global level. When governments deployed vast resources to rescue financial institutions after the 2008 crash, surely the poor, the vulnerable, and the meek also should have been granted the status of “too big to fail.” Most importantly, Benedict asserted with admirable clarity and logic that religion has an essential and beneficial role to play even in a secular society. The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms by which we determine right action are not matters of faith but are accessible to reason and logic totally apart from divine revelation. Just as religion can be perverted into fundamentalism or sectarianism, reason can also be distorted by partial application or when manipulated by ideology. Misuse of reason, without the corrective of religion, was precisely what led to the slave trade and the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Religion, Benedict asserted, is not a problem to be solved but a vital contributor to the conversations of our society at every level.

Pope Benedict XVI will be remembered for his kindly, calm reassurance of truths we had partly forgotten. He will also be recalled for the extensive and gratuitous generosity he showed in allowing a much broader access to the older form of the Mass that is beloved and treasured by many of us (myself included). Likewise for destroying the barriers that prevented many members and clergy of the Church of England (and other Anglican bodies) from being received into the full communion of the Catholic Church, erecting the personal ordinariates for the care of these souls. I only wish that, instead of abdicating, he had required every priest around the world to offer a Latin Mass every Sunday. But my job is to look after the temporal needs of the seventy-five thousand voters of the Gainsborough constituency, not the spiritual needs of over a billion Catholics worldwide.

The stone floor of Westminster Hall has many metal plaques commemorating the events there: one for the trial of Saint Thomas More, another for that of Charles I. The most recent one marks the lying-in-state of our late sovereign, Elizabeth II. The next, we hope, will memorialize the address given by the Roman pontiff that Her Late Majesty welcomed to this realm. The intricate hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall features angels carved into the woodwork, which Benedict pointed out in his address: “They remind us that God is constantly watching over us to guide and protect us.” I pray they speed his soul to the beatific vision he was inspired by his entire life.

Sir Edward Leigh is the Conservative MP for Gainsborough, and has been an MP continuously since 1983.

John Milbank

Benedict XVI was a very fine theologian. It does him false credit to exaggerate: he was not one of the greatest theologians of all time, nor even one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century. But he was an immensely astute and judicious thinker, often more temperately balanced than greater but more extreme theorists like Balthasar and above all one who managed to intertwine a very high level of scholarship and reflection with a life of practice and of leadership.

It is a mistake, also, to think of Benedict as simply as supplement to the conservative John Paul II, before the arrival of the relatively liberal Francis. As a theologian, Benedict was considerably more significant than John Paul was as a philosopher, since he was not top-ranking as a phenomenologist. As a scion of the Nouvelle théologie, he was, moreover, more obviously distanced from neo-scholasticism than his predecessor. An insistence that true nature is always engraced, an admiration for the philosophy and theology of Romano Guardini, and indeed an interest in the Franciscan tradition are, by contrast, significant marks of continuity between Benedict and his successor.

It is more interesting, as so often, to eschew either comparative praise or comparative denigration and to focus, instead, on a tension within Benedict’s written oeuvre, and one that has little to do with whether he can be considered progressive or traditionalist. Significantly prior to his encounter with the theology of Henri de Lubac, Ratzinger had already written a controversial doctrinal thesis on the theology of history of Saint Bonaventure as part of his embrace of the symbolic and eventful as the real site of revelation, as opposed to the Suarezian notion of the revelation of abstract propositions. It was understandable that for him at this time he was considerably put off from studying Saint Thomas Aquinas because he had mostly met scholars who approached the Angelic Doctor through a neo-scholastic overlay.

Yet in embracing a Bonaventuran view of history, Ratzinger had already distinguished himself from the Augustinian view of history as found in de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. For Augustine, history “ends” with Christ, and all that follows is equally an echo of that ending. But from Bonaventure’s perspective, which half-embraces that of Joachim of Fiore, Christ is the “middle” or “hinge” of a history that of itself bears a revelatory freight, such that particular events anno Domini, like the coming of Saint Francis, are seen as prophesied by the Old Testament. This goes along with the view that the efficient chain of causes in time has a literal beginning and end in God; a view denied by Aquinas, for whom in principle time and history might last forever and only the chain of hierarchical genera—like stone, tree, man, and angel—necessarily points back to God as first cause.

In consequence, for both Augustine and Aquinas, history is only of significance as Christological. But this means that while the incarnation allows us to be spiritually deified, it also allows an extension of the Incarnation as the Church (Augustine’s Christus Totus) and an ever-increased concrete sacralizing of human institutions: a transformation of existing family, economy, and politics. For Bonaventure and most Franciscans, by contrast, the salvific future is more one-sidedly one of increased interiorization and spiritualization—this, and not “Gnosticism” as often supposed, being one long-term source of secular notions of a spiritual kingdom to come in this world alone. Such an outlook has tended to encourage “utopian” escapes from current institutions which of themselves, like all property ownership, are seen as inherently corrupt.

Naturally, Ratzinger embraced no such tendencies, and eventually his thought became more Thomistic and focused on intellect and truth, more than the willed and the affective. Yet even in his mature writings the Bonaventuran note remains: “incarnating” is associated, surely wrongly, with the merely institutional, and the work and gifts of the Spirit are deliberately distinguished from the influence of Christ, in a way that seems to impair Ratzinger’s insistence otherwise on the unity of the Trinitarian action ad extra.

It is difficult not to connect this almost “charismatic” note with Benedict’s suggestion at times that the Church in future may be smaller but purer in character and somewhat in retreat from the world. Yet a more drastic outlook on the future might suggest that this is false comfort and that once Christian inculturation has failed, so also Christianity itself will seem to fail within time. For it is after all the religion of incarnating as well as the religion of spiritual deifying. Quite different, surely, was Benedict’s insistence, against all voluntarism, including the Islamic variant, that what is universal is reason, but that we can only have faith in the infinity of reason if we see that reason has been manifest as incarnate and as informing and transforming also our finite world.

This was surely his greatest achievement: the incarnational defense of the infinite and so final truth of reason against the German finitist legacy of Kant, as represented today by Jürgen Habermas. But it implies, with Augustine, that Christ ended history and that our salvation involves a sustaining of this ending in concretely rational terms, including social projects of engraced fraternal reciprocity, which Caritas in veritate so strikingly recommends. If we pursue this course, then perhaps the future holds out, as Augustine supposed, an increasing tension between the embodied evil of this world and a Church not retreated to the contemplative margins, but embattled and yet concrete in the midst of the world. A Church like a cathedral fortress standing in the urban wasteland and not a bourgeois charismatic house-group for the comfortably agonized. A Church seeking to realize reason in material practice rather than represent it in the necessarily contested space of the virtual. We need now neither the Benedict option nor the Franciscan one, but the renewed building and defense of the castle of truth.

John Milbank is emeritus professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Bishop 
Thomas J. Paprocki

I had the honor of meeting Pope Benedict XVI several times. I will forever remember his friendliness and compassion. His theological genius and his ability to communicate our rich and oftentimes difficult theology to the people in a clear and understandable way was most impressive.

The first time I met him in person was when I was a priest doing graduate studies in Rome from 1987 to 1991, many years before he was elected pope. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. It was not uncommon to see him walking across Saint Peter’s Square on his way from his apartment to the Holy Office, as it was called, wearing a simple black cassock and the red skullcap or zucchetto of a cardinal of the Church, carrying his briefcase full of papers for his day’s work. He was very approachable and would casually say hello as people passed by.

After I was appointed auxiliary bishop of Chicago in 2003, the bishops of Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin had our periodic ad limina visit with Pope John Paul II in 2004. During that week in Rome, in addition to meeting with the pope, we had several meetings at the Vatican with various dicasteries or departments of the Holy See. The meeting that impressed me most was the one we had at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where Cardinal Ratzinger mostly listened to us, allowed his staff to do most of the talking, and then intervened with his intelligent and insightful remarks.

Years later, after he became pope, it was in the spring of 2010 when I was informed that I had been appointed bishop of Springfield in Illinois just before I boarded a flight in Chicago on my way to spend Holy Week in Rome. I attended the pope’s General Audience in Saint Peter’s Square on Wednesday of that week and had the opportunity to greet the Holy Father after he concluded his remarks. As an auxiliary bishop, I was youngest in seniority among the bishops in attendance, so I was last in line to greet Pope Benedict after he finished his talk. When I walked up to the Holy Father, I introduced myself and said that I had just received word that he had appointed me to be Bishop of Springfield in Illinois. I thanked him for the appointment and for his confidence in me, assuring him that I would do my best to try to be a good bishop.

The Catholic Church has lost an incredible and humble man, but his legacy leaves a lasting impression on the faithful and our Church. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was an authentic example of faithfulness to God and Catholicism, living and preaching the Gospel message with truth and passion. He was always writing and teaching, and his warm smile, gentle demeanor, and pastoral approach to explaining and living out the Catholic faith inspired millions and brought people closer to Christ. His reverence toward the Eucharist, the Mass, and the sacraments are examples for us today of how we should all view and respect these treasures of the Catholic faith. His steadfast defense of our faith’s teachings and traditions, despite the pressures of the secular world and from inside the Church, is the mark of a true leader.

Thomas John Paprocki is bishop of Springfield, Illinois.

Kenneth J. Wolfe

My appreciation for Benedict XVI lies with the traditional Latin Mass, which he liberated after years of oppression. Although Pope John Paul II indeed lifted a total ban by Pope Paul VI on the celebration of the old Mass, it was done in the 1980s via indults—which meant the permissions were an exception to the rule. Never had this been accomplished since the invention of the Novus Ordo liturgy, implemented in Advent 1969. The closest indult was by Paul VI, for Agatha Christie and a group of English Catholic writers—but that was merely for the reformed Mass using the 1965 books following Vatican II’s initial liturgical reforms, not the 1962 missal.

Arguably John Paul, in the 1980s, was responding to the rise of the Society of Saint Pius X, with its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, former superior general of the Holy Ghost Fathers, consecrating four bishops to continue the use of the older books for sacraments. The S.S.P.X. went on to grow, even after John Paul’s attempt to allow limited traditional Latin Masses around the world. In fact, the Society announced last year it has more than 700 priests around the world, a number that will continue to grow as most other religious congregations of men continue to decline. Pope John Paul II was onto something, seeing the interest in Catholics wanting to use the old books again, but he never loosened the handcuffs more than a notch or two.

Pope Benedict XVI, however, saw the growing demand for restored traditional sacraments as something the Church should embrace. He offered traditional Latin Masses as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, befriending the newly formed Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, and spoke at a 1998 conference at the Vatican on the tenth anniversary of the FSSP and the limited Latin Mass indults, which this writer was privileged to attend, including meeting the cardinal and receiving his blessing. Ratzinger observed the number of young adults attracted to the pre–Vatican II rites and, like any good leader, supported wholesome things that were growing—particularly in an age where the Church was hemorrhaging in every measurable statistic, from Mass attendance to vocations.

His liturgical writings included the most in-depth book on liturgy by anyone to become pope in recent history, Spirit of the Liturgy. In it, there remain countless quotable passages, most notably on the direction Mass should be offered: “The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.” Another, my personal favorite, is as haunting as it is prophetic: “The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy.”

As pope, of course, Benedict XVI promulgated the motu proprio Summorum pontificum, removing bishops’ veto power with respect to the traditional Latin Mass, plus giving permission for all sacraments, the Divine Office, and the Roman Ritual to be used by any priest. The handcuffs were not only loosened, but tossed away, with the pontiff’s declaration that the traditional Latin Mass had never been abrogated. By doing so, he effectively declared his predecessors, Paul VI and John Paul II, in error—as both men had operated as if the old books were indeed abrogated, the latter pope offering indults as exceptions to that premise. Moreover, Benedict reversed John Paul’s excommunications of SSPX bishops, once again opening dialogue between the Vatican and the Society.

Still, all was not perfect under the Benedict papacy. But the relatively small disagreements paled in comparison with the majestic victories of restoration and counter-revolution during the Benedict papacy. Gone were the polyester chasubles of the 1970s and 1980s, and dusted off were centuries of absolutely beautiful vestments. The pope, from 2005 to 2013, dressed like his predecessors before the 1960s, befitting of his office. The ceremonies, the music, the dignity—Benedict took the role of pope seriously. The Benedict papacy will be known for returning beauty to the Church, not based on a whim, but on centuries of tradition.

Kenneth J. Wolfe is a contributor for the blog Rorate Caeli.


Peter A. 
Kwasniewski

In my home library, few authors enjoy the privilege of occupying several shelves all their own. Among them are Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, P.G. Wodehouse—and Joseph Ratzinger.

My love affair with his writing began, as it did for so many others, with an interview, The Ratzinger Report, later to be joined by Salt of the Earth, God and the World, and Light of the World. As my familiarity with his work increased, I began to assign his works to my students: Behold the Pierced One for Christology, Called to Communion for ecclesiology, the essay “Truth and Freedom” for ethics, Deus caritas est for Catholic social teaching, and The Spirit of the Liturgy for any course for which it could be even remotely justified.

Although I had already fallen in love with the traditional Roman rite from experience, it was Ratzinger who opened my eyes to why I loved it—who equipped me with a theological and spiritual rationale. He made my own mind and heart intelligible to me, gave me language with which to express what had been an intuition and an attraction. Here was a highly literate, sophisticated, rather audacious modern theologian who valued tradition, explained its meaning, rebuked its assailants, and advanced its recovery. That he was the right-hand man of John Paul II and followed him to the Chair of Peter added to the momentary elation of recovering ecclesial territory after a series of brutal losses.

For me, two key moments in his papacy stand out as permanent points of reference.

The first was the pope’s inaugural homily at Saint John Lateran on May 7, 2005, in the course of which he said: “The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary, the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism. . . . The Pope knows that in his important decisions, he is bound to the great community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations that have developed throughout the Church’s pilgrimage. Thus, his power is not being above, but at the service of, the Word of God. It is incumbent upon him to ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.”

The second key moment was the promulgation of Summorum pontificum just over two years later, in the teeth of ferocious resistance. The keenness of that resistance can be surmised by recalling that the selfsame conclusions had been reached twenty years earlier by a commission of cardinals appointed by John Paul II in 1986, but no action was then taken. Yet now the pope of Rome—heeding his duty to remain “bound to the great community of faith of all times”—articulated a principle that a healthy Church would be able to take for granted: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.” This is no mere time-bound prudential evaluation, subject to an unceremonious reversal under the next regime; it enunciates a perennial principle, a truth that flows from the nature of the Catholic faith in its received and approved historical embodiment, the fruit of Divine Providence.

All the same, there are frustrating traits in Ratzinger’s writings, as there were in his behavior. His theology contains irreconcilable elements, commitments that clash like dissonant notes: the application of a “hermeneutic of reform-in-continuity” was not always persuasive, let alone obvious, and the “reform of the reform” was stillborn. We might say that his heart was more traditional than his mind, and that, when he allowed himself to think, feel, and perceive with the Church of all ages (sentire cum ecclesia), he uttered profound and timeless truths that landed like exploding bombs in the midst of the post-conciliar Church’s false peace.

That this pope could have publicly celebrated, in all its grandeur, the traditional rite of the papal court in Rome, but never did, was a grave disappointment. That he abdicated the throne of Peter at the very moment when his enemies were most likely to seize it and spit upon his priorities brought bitter desolation. That he barely lifted a finger to protest his successor’s deviations augmented the sense of abandonment. In this way he somehow tarnished the brightness of his own witness and work—not canceling out its wisdom, to be sure, but suffusing it with a melancholy note of defeatism. We have been left with a potent legacy that requires not only intelligent assimilation but (and, I would say, far more urgently) a courageous and energetic realization beyond what its own progenitor could achieve.

Regardless of his own complicated and conflicted relationship with it, regardless of our current weariness and woes, Benedict XVI helped mightily in clearing the way for a return of the fullness of Catholic tradition. He mainstreamed concerns that only the maligned “Lefebvrists” had hitherto dared to utter and act upon. The gentle scholar-pope sparked a “new liturgical movement,” a mission of rediscovery and restoration, that even his worst enemies cannot reverse, however much—in their senescent agitation—they hurl obstacles in its path.

Peter A. Kwasniewski is the author of many books and a composer of sacred choral music.

Scott D. 
Moringiello

All philosophy begins in wonder for the world. All theology begins in prayer toward God. All teaching beings with a question for a student. Pope Benedict XVI helps my students wonder about the most important question we all face: what do I love and why do I love it? He helps them consider that the proper response to the source of our love is prayer.

By the time the students in my Introduction to Catholicism class read Benedict’s masterful Deus caritas est, they have been in class with me for nine weeks of our ten-week term. In 2022, the students were blissfully unaware of Church gossip and ecclesiastical politics. They didn’t know anything about a “pope emeritus,” and I needed to remind them that we had read a chapter of Joseph Ratzinger’s Spirit of the Liturgy earlier in the quarter. Despite my best efforts, the names of the authors we read tend to blur together.

But Deus caritas est and its author are unlikely to slip their minds. Perhaps it is because the encyclical perfectly recapitulates all the themes we have discussed in the class that began with Herbert McCabe’s essay “God” and moved through discussions of the Scriptures, Jesus, the Church, prayer, sacraments, and the moral life. In forty-two paragraphs, Benedict addresses the nature of God, he offers biblical exegesis, he gives a history of the Church, and he discusses the relationships between love and justice and between the Church and the state. He poses questions about our relationships with God and with each other. He invites questions about how we live out the loves we proclaim.

The former professor from Tübingen teaches my university students that Christianity is a philosophically serious, historically important, theologically sophisticated, and existentially demanding love story. It’s not the ersatz love story that undergirds our economy and its constant need for consumption. It’s the love story that begins with the foundation of the world and that calls each of us to participate in it.

Perhaps the most well-known section of the text reads: “Being” Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” When I read this sentence aloud in class, I see my students’ eyes widen. All of them are looking for relationships that will give their lives a decisive direction. All of them are looking for communities that will foster those relationships. None of them, prior to my class and prior especially to reading this text, thought of the Church as that kind of community, and they did not think of Jesus as the person with whom to have that kind of relationship.

Because I’m in front of a college class, questions abound. These questions tend to take two forms. First, the students want to know more about love in the first half of the encyclical. Second, they want to know more about the Church’s charitable activity in the second half.

My students have an inchoate sense that their understanding of love is unfulfilling. This understanding, at base, sees love in terms of sentimentality. It doesn’t even come to the level of eros. So the students want to know more about the relationship between erotic love and agapic love. They’re surprised to learn that Benedict values erotic love so highly. They become convinced there is something to the picture he draws: “Contact with the visible manifestations of God’s love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born from the experience of being loved. But this encounter also engages our will and our intellect.” If we continue loving, Benedict tells us “self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy.” We love God through loving our neighbor. Our love is always a response to being loved. Only love helps us realize who we truly are.

Once we move away from love-as-sentimentality and toward love-as-commitment-and-fulfillment we then see the Church as the community that lives out God’s love. With Benedict’s help, my students see that most of the stereotypes of the relationship between Church and state that they have heard are false. The Church’s charitable activity “is not a means of changing the world ideologically. . . . but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs.” As I tell my students, justice is making sure everyone has something to eat; love is making sure no one eats alone.

Like all of us, my students need to wonder more, to pray more, and to question more. They need to encounter thinkers who encourage them to do those things. Most of all, they need to know that the God Catholics worship is love and that understanding love is not merely an intellectual exercise but a lifelong commitment. I’m grateful to Pope Benedict XVI for helping me explain all of this to my students. I pray I do his words—and now his memory—justice, and I pray that the same love that gave life to his teaching gives life to mine.

Scott D. Moriengello is associate professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University.

Edward Peters

Every generation has its great figures, and each generation is convinced that its great figures will be remembered for a millennium. Most generations are doomed to disappointment in that regard (quick, name a famous pharaoh from Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty), which suggests that the perduring greatness of this figure or that is more dependent on passing conditions than we might realize. Whether Benedict XVI is remembered a thousand years from now as a profound synthesizer of the Second Vatican Council and a prophetic defender of dignity in divine worship or figures only in footnotes as an example of a pope who resigned for no obvious reason, none can tell. But uncertainty concerning the fate of Benedict’s legacy does not obviate the need for us, his contemporaries, to study the works of one whom our age, at least, may rightly regard as great.

Referring thus far only to “Benedict XVI,” I risk prejudicing one of the main observations to be offered here, namely, that as much, and perhaps for my purposes, even more, attention needs to be paid to works that Benedict produced when he was known as Ratzinger and served the Church as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under a pope who will surely be regarded as “great” a millennium from now. I say “for my purposes” because, while many more qualified than I are examining Ratzinger/Benedict’s theological corpus, I approach the works of Ratzinger/Benedict with an eye toward their canonical significance and have concluded that, while I have never read a theological work by Ratzinger-Benedict that failed to edify me spiritually, his canonical works (better put, those works with canonical significance) are more varied in their degrees of soundness.

I hasten to make two points: when expressing concern for the “soundness” of some of Ratzinger/Benedict’s canonical assertions I do not imply doubts about their doctrinal orthodoxy but rather about their canonical implications; second, as Ratzinger/Benedict received no canonical training beyond the seminary I am being careful not to hold him to a degree of technical precision that could have come only with further education in canon law. Those points being made, let me begin with some examples of his works that I feel are quite valuable to sound canonistics.

When promulgated, the Johanno-Pauline Code of 1983 lacked provisions identifying and protecting what are known as “secondary objects of infallibility,” that is, assertions which, though not themselves divinely revealed (i.e., not “primary objects of infallibility”), need to be known with infallible certitude in order to protect divinely revealed truths. For example, the divinity of Jesus (a primary object of infallibility) was defined by the Council of Nicaea only in 325. We nevertheless trust Nicaea’s definition not because Nicaea could produce divine revelation (it could not) but, given that assertions by ecumenical councils about exactly what is contained in divine revelation can be accepted with infallible certitude and because the ecumenicity of selected councils can be known with the same certitude (both points being secondary objects of infallibility), we can know with certainty that Jesus was divine. In short, while assaults against primary objects of infallibility (known technically as “heresies”) were addressed in the revised code, assaults against secondary objects were not. In 1998 John Paul II (almost certainly at Ratzinger’s instigation) filled this gap in the code by adding language to Canons 750 and 1371, whereupon Ratzinger himself, as head of C.D.F., issued an incisive explanation of the pope’s amendment of the law. This “Doctrinal Commentary on Ad tuendam fidem” deserves a place alongside Gasser’s Relatio for its contribution to the Church’s understanding and exercise of her charism of infallibility and the canonical laws treating those matters.

Of similarly great value to canon law would be, I suggest, Ratzinger’s writings on communion among churches in the early 2000s, writings that he presented as ecclesiological but that highlighted key values that canonists must take into consideration when treating of what we call “supra-diocesan structures” and the canonical relationships between the Holy See and local churches. Or again, Ratzinger’s decisions about Mormon baptism in 2001 will have ramifications for sacramental law for many centuries to come. But alongside these wonderful contributions not to canon law expressly but to values that canon law serves, there are other Ratzinger/Benedict decisions and writings that, in my view, are problematic.

For example, on the eve of the code’s entry into force Ratzinger purported to interpret authentically the revised law on Masonic membership (a matter he had failed to convince John Paul II needed reformulation in the new code) and, in my view, did damage thereby to the understanding of issues such as authority to interpret codified canon law. His attempts to downgrade the infallible character of John Paul II’s Ordinatio sacerdotalis introduced, I fear, confusion in an area that is difficult to reconcile with his later treatment of the institute, while his procedural guidelines for examination of doctrinal disputes, substantively so solid, ended awkwardly with recitals that decisions made by the C.D.F. in such matters admitted of no appeal, this, despite an unbroken canonical tradition that recognizes the right of all the faithful to appeal any ecclesiastical rulings to the Supreme Pontiff. Still other worrisome examples can be suggested.

As pope, Benedict’s 2009 modifications of the initial canons on holy orders have driven a wedge, I think, between the diaconate and presbyterate that could weaken respect for the diaconate and leave the presbyterate more vulnerable to attacks against the pastoral priority of orders in ministry. His introductions of new sanctions to be incurred automatically and his elimination of prudent exceptions to canonical form for marriage strengthened two problematic canonical institutes that had been, and should have remained, in decline. Or again, his idiosyncratic use of the terms “ordinary” and “extraordinary” to describe distinct rites for celebrating Mass severs those canonically useful terms from their interpretive roots. In sum, although the works left by Ratzinger/Benedict are overwhelmingly theological, nevertheless his contributions to canonistics are so significant in number and so varied in quality as to deserve their own study and assessment.

Dr. Edward Peters teaches canon law at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.


Thomas G. 
Weinandy

What I appreciated most about Pope Benedict XVI—a virtue that he manifested throughout his life—was his quiet humility. He was never a boisterous man who pushed himself into the limelight. Rather, his calm, unassuming presence brought to every situation a reassuring strength that all would be done well and in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s will. This quiet humility was founded not upon Benedict’s intellectual acumen but upon his firmness of faith in the Gospel, a faith that was expressed in the Church’s magisterial teaching and Her ecclesial theological tradition. Even in his retirement, these virtues were silently and prayerfully manifested.

This humble love for the Gospel and the Church’s teaching is witnessed during Benedict’s time as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. While he was often criticized for being overly zealous in his search for suspected heresy, that is not accurate. His approach was much more positive—engendering and encouraging the theological and academic community in their pursuit of bringing to light the fullness of truth that Jesus and the Catholic theological tradition embodied. As pope this affirmative attitude perdured. Benedict’s talks and encyclicals consistently presented the truths of the faith in a manner that would win over the doubter and confirm the faith of the believer. Benedict was but a humble servant of Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior.

That being said, all would acknowledge, and most would praise, Benedict’s intellectual ability, a gift that is seen in academic work. To this day, his Introduction to Christianity continues to be read by appreciative students and members of the theological academy. Likewise, his Spirit of the Liturgy is a foundational text for appreciating and understanding the Church’s liturgy that has come down to us through the ages. Benedict, in many ways, was a liturgical theologian. He loved the Mass and the sacraments, for he was convinced that they enacted, made present, all the mysteries of the faith, such that those who participated in them reaped their saving benefits. Every priest and seminarian should be required to read and study The Spirit of the Liturgy. Not only do I think that they would come to love the liturgy as Benedict loved it, but such study would also help alleviate much of the rancor that exists in our present “liturgical wars.” Much of his sound learning and wise counsel would calmly prevail.

Both before and after his election as pope, Joseph Ratzinger bore the slings and arrows that were hurled at him by many within and outside the Church. Members of the secular and ecclesial liberal elite media were, and still are, relentless in their criticism and in their characterization of him as an unyielding rigid conservative. But such rancor towards Benedict merely makes evident the lack of faith among many of his critics, as well as simultaneously highlighting his own steadfastness in the faith. Benedict, as a person, as an academic, as an archbishop, and as pope was and remains a light in the darkness. His light will continue to shine even now when he has passed from this world into his heavenly reward. There, with all of the saints, he will give glory to God the Father, in union with Jesus, the risen incarnate Son, in communion with the love of the Holy Spirit. He will forever rejoice in celebrating the heavenly liturgy—the heavenly Eucharistic banquet of the Lamb.

Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., is a former member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission.


Archbishop 
Joseph Naumann

Pope Benedict XVI was one of the gentlest, kindest, and most unassuming human beings whom I have ever met. He was a great defender of the faith. Benedict was able to articulate what we believe as Catholics in a very compelling and persuasive way. One of the late Holy Father’s great achievements was being the architect of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, providing a masterful, comprehensive articulation of the full breadth of our Catholic faith. Pope Benedict understood well the danger of what he termed the dictatorship of relativism, a belief that each person can define his or her own truth, even if our particular truths contradict each other. Combatting the mistaken notion of the human person that results from relativism, Pope Benedict promoted a robust Christian humanism that appreciated the dignity of every human being created in the divine image and of such worth that God, in the person of Jesus Christ, immersed Himself in our humanity and gave His life on Calvary for each of us.

I consider Benedict’s greatest legacy to the Church to be his clear teaching that our Catholic faith is not simply or primarily an intellectual assent to a set of propositions. At the beginning of his first encyclical letter, Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict wrote: “Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but an encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” The core of what it means to be a Catholic is an encounter with a living person, Jesus Christ. The heart of our Catholic faith is to develop a friendship with Jesus that can only happen through the sacraments and a life of prayer, giving us joy in the everyday events of life and serenity in the midst of adversity and difficulty, even in the face of death. I give thanks for the incredible leadership of Benedict. I hope that someday he will be recognized and honored as a saint and doctor of the Church. If we wish to honor Pope Benedict, then let us follow his example and pursue friendship with Jesus above all else.

Joseph Naumann is archbishop of Kansas City.

Michael Hanby

Perhaps the greatest measure of Joseph Ratzinger’s profundity is the clarity and simplicity with which his erudition was expressed, as if insight, without the slightest hint of jargon or pretense, flowed naturally from some wellspring deep within him, some fontal source of communion with the truth. Which of course it did. To pick up any of his great theological works, Introduction to Christianity, The Spirit of the Liturgy, the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, or even the slim little collection of homilies on creation, In the Beginning, is immediately to find oneself at the living intersection of philosophy and prayer. His very life exemplified the deep lesson of Caritas in veritate, his third encyclical, that love and truth are inseparable. Because he was a true theologian, one who speaks with God, he was a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom and truth. And vice versa.

It is a thing simple and obvious, really, which is perhaps why it is so easy to miss. This is especially true of an un-philosophical age that has largely forgotten how to think, dominated as it is by politics and its functionalist forms of thought. But it is this devotion to truth, or rather to the One who is the Truth, as well as the Way and the Life, that underlies and unifies his expansive body of thought. But it is this devotion to truth, or rather to the One who is the Truth, as well as the Way and the Life, that underlies and unifies his extraordinary, expansive thought. Ratzinger’s embrace of the Christological, anthropological, and missionary focus of Vatican II was inseparable from his conviction that the Spirit who animates the Church in her historical mission was the Spirit of the Father and his eternal Logos, and that the Logos was not a static idea but a living reality, indeed Life itself. His decades-long effort to reconcile the Church’s internal schism with its past and to restore the liturgy to its cosmological significance and proper grandeur was above all an attempt to turn the Church’s gaze toward the One who precedes and transcends all things. His quest to recover the doctrine of creation from its modern oblivion was an attempt to avert “the danger that confronts us in our technological civilization. . . . that we have cut ourselves off from this primordial knowledge,” in the hope that we might rediscover and remember the highest and deepest truth about ourselves.

It is this steadfast devotion to the eternal God, living and true, that made Ratzinger our most profound interpreter of “the signs of the times” and thus the quintessential “man of the Council.” “The real problem at this moment of our history,” he wrote in 2009, “is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.” He understood with acute philosophical clarity that truth would be the first casualty of the eclipse of God. His eight-page synopsis of the history of truth in the first chapter of Introduction to Christianity is at once a masterclass in the history of thought and a profound diagnosis of why our technological civilization was destined to suffer its present crisis. In The Principles of Catholic Theology, he recognized the reconciliation of being and time, truth and history, as the principal intellectual challenge facing the Church and the philosophical root of most of Her internal divisions over individual Christian teachings. And throughout his time as prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II and later as pope, he pleaded for the recovery of a deeper, more comprehensive conception of reason that could undergird a truly humane humanism. He understood as few have what is proving every day to be true, that reason itself cannot survive our collective loss of faith.

Though he had an unshakeable confidence in the fidelity and ultimate victory of Christ, and thus in the mysterious indefectibility of the Church, Ratzinger understood that the Church Herself was not immune from the dark shadow of this eclipse. He had seen too much. Many have wondered, in the years of his self-imposed silence, what he thought of the revolutionary new paradigm imposed upon the Church in the years following his resignation, a paradigm in which truth as the object of human thought and the fulfillment of human striving seems to have been replaced with the ideological categories of a D.E.I. workshop. They needn’t have wondered, for he anticipated and criticized most of these latter-day developments well in advance of their happening. This is presumably one reason why so many champions of the new paradigm, including some who had gone apoplectic with every reminder he was still alive and met his death with ready-made “tributes” damning him with faint praise, have found it so urgent to reposition or erase the memory of his legacy. Ratzinger worried about a Church that conflated the Spirit of God with the spirit of the age, just as he worried about an ahistorical Christianity of dead formulas that had lost their power. He battled incessantly, in the “ecclesiology wars” of the 1980s and beyond, against the sociological and political reduction of the Church inherent in the progressive appropriation of the “People of God.” He sought to recapture the Church’s transcendent nature and restore her self-understanding to its proper theological, ontological, and sacramental basis. He understood that charity evacuated of truth would become mere sentimentality. And he knew that without a mutual commitment to truth, “dialogue” was really just a mask for a monologue of power.

Ratzinger also understood that if truth were the first casualty in the eclipse of God, it would not be the last. The real question at stake in creation, he wrote in 1986, was not whether God exists, but “Do human beings really exist?” Recognizing that the “anthropological question” at the heart of the conciliar vision had grown only more urgent with time, he would echo this conviction still more emphatically in the face of new, heretofore unimaginable threats to the humanum. His 2012 Christmas address to the Roman Curia, in what turns out to have been virtually his last words as pope, has proven to be prophetic. No summary could do justice to the power of the words themselves:

While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being—of what being human really means—is being called into question. [Chief Rabbi of France Gilles Bernheim] quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female—hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

​Imagine if this warning had been heeded and the defense of God and man had been at the center of the 2014–15 Synod on the Family, the origin of so much of the discord and chaos that has bitterly divided the Church over the last decade. Might some of the present divisions have been averted? Would this not have been more faithful to the spirit and the letter of Vatican II, whose greatest concern, John XXIII said in his speech opening the Council, is “that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously?” For it is precisely “the whole of man, composed as he is of body and soul” that “this doctrine embraces.” And it is to our society’s wholesale rejection of “the truth about man,” a central concern of the council, that the Church is in danger of acquiescing.

​It was common, even prior to his death, to read that Joseph Ratzinger has left an enduring treasure of teaching that the Church will still contemplate a century from now. Amid the bitter conflicts that now divide the Church, his death seems to have sparked a renewed interest in his thought, perhaps with the unexpected consequence of accelerating that process. His death would then mark not only the end of an era but the beginning of one, providing reason to hope as well as to pray that this gentle, quiet, scholarly man might win in the hearts of the Christian faithful (and thus in reality) what he lost on the battlefield of ecclesiastical politics, that he might achieve in death what he failed to accomplish in life, and that the dark shadow of our long eclipse might yet give way to the light of truth.

Michael Hanby is an associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America.